Shopping Carts for your On-line Customers

What is a Shopping Cart?

Shopping carts are used in e-commerce to assist on-line shoppers to make purchases from a Web site. Shopping carts are also known as a 'shopping basket', both terms are often shortened to just 'basket' or 'cart' on the website respectively.

Shopping carts provide a means for on-lineOn-line shopping customers to accrue, view and change items
for purchase. At checkout time, the shopping cart software calculates a total for the order, taxes, applicable shipping, postage and packaging charges. Most shopping carts also provide a discount system whereby the shopper could enter a code to have the discount applied.

There are two sides to a shopping cart; a store-front and an administrative back-end. On-line shoppers experience the store-front. Shop owners or shop staff manage the store-front via the administrative back-end.

Barriers to Establishing Online Shopping Carts

The most common barriers to establishing an online shopping cart include client inexperience with Web applications and over reliance on human processing for existing order fulfilment. Web applications tend to be burdensome with prerequisite knowledge and administering the store-front for an online shopping cart is no exception. Many retailers and wholesalers overly rely on human processing to complete the transaction process.

Education and training is the solution for gaining the necessary skills to administer Web applications. The amount of training is not extensive; a few week-end T.A.F.E courses will cover the basics of working on the Web.

Preparing your business for online sales involves eliminating the human factor from your sales process. The shopping cart needs exacting information in regards to your products, pricing policies, packaging and shipping methods. For example, online shopping carts cannot measure, weigh and calculate packaging and shipping costs on-the-fly as humans do without having all of these details predefined.

Another barrier exists for Australians using popular, open-source shopping carts, GST compliance. Most shopping carts are developed for the European VAT system, or American sales tax. v2Media will always ensure that your shopping cart is fully Australian GST compliant.